A first-time geek dad's adventures in child-raising

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In the past week or so, Morgan has started to babble, which excites Jen and me to no end. Saturday evening, I was singing to Morgan (like you do) when I started humming a random tune and pausing in between bars. At first she didn’t know what to make of it, although she thought it was rather funny, but eventually she figured out that I was giving her a chance to be a part of the song. Suddenly, almost every time I would pause in my humming, she would babble something back to me. We kept it up for a good 3 or 4 minutes and, young though she is, I think Morgan appreciated the thought that daddy wanted her to sing along.

Sunday morning, I woke up to the sound of Morgan babbling happily away and walked, bleary-eyed, into the living room to be told that Morgan had been carrying on a conversation with the Ninja Turtles on Jen’s water glass for the past ten minutes. By the time I woke up, she was mostly finished with her conversation, but I can only imagine the wisdom she felt Leo, Don, Raph, and Mikey needed to hear. It’s going to be a lot of fun to sit down with her and actually watch Ninja Turtles cartoons when she gets a little bit older.

We have found out, however, that Morgan is either camera shy or techno-curious, because all her babbling ceases within 5-10 seconds of noticing a camera. Given her daddy’s love of gadgetry, I’m going to go with techno-curious.

It is fresh and amazing every day to see her sense of joy and wonder at the experiences I take so much for granted. Something as simple as standing on my lap while I hold her up lights her face up unimaginably bright. Something as simple as not understanding the body mechanics involved in consistently rolling over gets her incredibly frustrated. So many things that are as mundane as peas on a plate to me are fascinating to her. In fact, I’m sure peas on a plate will be pretty fascinating the first time she gets to try them.

The sum of our experiences help make us who we are. It is almost obscene to imagine that something as simple as standing on daddy’s lap singing between the bars of a nameless tune has forever etched and shaped a small part of Morgan’s personality. The language of a child is the language of creation itself, chaotic and vital and beyond our comprehension. It truly is a thing of wonder.

There is something absolutely magical about waking Morgan up. It may change as time goes on, but I have never seen a baby who is happier to be woken up. Her eyes come open and she immediately starts smiling, which is, if possible, even cuter if she somehow manages to keep her pacifier in all night, because her eyes light up in a smile while her gums grip the pacifier like Popeye’s pipe.

Sure, if it’s time to eat, those smiles can turn into frowns and fussiness pretty quickly, but even if she’s slept all night, she always has at least one smile for mommy and/or daddy when she first wakes up, as if she knows that we would never let her go hungry, so even if her tummy is rumbly, she wants us to know how much she loves us before she tells us that she’s hungry. There is nothing in the world like those smiles.

I never new just how much my heart could melt until I saw her smile at me. Nothing compares to the abject joy her face expresses. That’s all I’ve got for you today, just a little bit of sappiness.